Samuel Baudinette

I was up in Bridgeport today to catsit for a friend and stopped by Tangible Books to see if I could find anything interesting. Walked out of the store with the following seminal works of anarchist art history (Read and Richter) and transcendentalist feminist philosophy (Fuller)!

These theses are dope. I’ve pulled out a few that resonated with the liberation psychology (Freire) and the decolonial analysis (Fanon) that I was reading about yesterday.

Federal government probes U. of C. on admissions and international students The University of Chicago is facing increased federal scrutiny of its admissions practices and international student enrollment, which could jeopardize hundreds of millions of dollars in federal resea...

Hmmmmm…

www.hpherald.com/evening_dige...

Gaztambide provides a great little summary of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy for critical consciousness in his “A People’s History of Psychoanalysis.”

Are The Motorcycle Diaries by Che actually worth reading? Trying to decide whether it would be fun to dip into it his week (for pleasure more than for critical study).

Two prose poems by César Vallejo. On suffering and on life.

But for me the true sin of such training is that it depoliticizes Paulo Freire and bell hooks by assimilating their critical pedagogy (with its goals of conscientization & self-actualization) to a framework oriented toward “multicultural competency” rather than liberation & political transformation.

I see people critique pedagogical training at the university for embracing behaviorist and psychological pseudo-science. And those are fair critiques (and critiques that I share).

Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936)

Löwy also discusses how Landauer’s particular conception of Judaism’s world-historical mission led him to reject Zionism and to embrace an anti-statist internationalism grounded in a diasporic and exilic conception of “the people.”

Here’s Michael Löwy on Landauer’s “religious atheism.”

“Meister Eckhart is too good for a historical homage; he must be raised from the dead!”

Gustav Landauer, from the preface to the translation of Eckhart’s works into modern German which he produced in 1899 while in prison (“for insulting behavior toward the authorities”).

Lyric poems from César Vallejo’s The Black Heralds.

Here’s Michael Löwy describing the dialectical relation between Walter Benjamin’s “secularization” of messianism and his “theologization” of Marxism.

Gaztambide offers a helpful comparison in the introduction to his People’s History of Psychoanalysis between the way that “fatalism” among oppressed & marginalized communities is addressed as a clinical problem by multicultural psychology & liberation psychology (as theorized by Ignacio Martín-Baró)

My classes at the psychoanalytic institute begin again in a month or so and I want to try and read Daniel José Gaztambide’s two books before they start. Especially because I’ll be enrolled in our institute’s course on (the politics of) psychoanalysis, race, and ethnicity!

I’ve been reading Ernesto Cardenal’s “The Gospel in Solentiname” and it’s pretty cool how frequently the campesinos who belonged to the community explain that the Bible teaches that “Christ wants us to be communist revolutionaries, like Fidel and Che!”

I really like this poem by César Vallejo!

I just learned today from Frei Betto’s record of his dialogue with Fidel Castro that he was apparently good friends with Marta Harnecker (who even attended several lectures on spirituality that Betto delivered to the Dominican community in Havana during his visit to Cuba in 1985)!

Here’s the conclusion from an essay in Joel Kovel’s “The Radical Spirit,” where he reflects further upon the Sandinista revolution and how liberation theology offers a theoretical challenge to (Freudo-)Marxist materialism.

I spent the afternoon reading the radical psychoanalyst Joel Kovel’s memoir of the Sandinista revolution. Based on his time working in the mental health field in Nicaragua he also discusses his experience with members of the Church of the Poor and of its liberation theology. It’s very good!

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Here are some reflections of Marie Langer, describing the therapeutic attempt to practice a Marxist psychoanalysis in the 1970s at a clinic in the hospital of Avellaneda (1/2)

16. ‘Reasonable accommodations’ are only an obligation to qualifying employers if they don’t cost too much (not to mention the many employers who are wholly exempt). That tells you everything: even the ADA is mediated by the profit motive.

15. Capitalism sorts people into categories: productive or surplus. Disabled and chronically ill people fall on the wrong side of that line by design. And then the system acts like our abandonment is inevitable.

14. ‘Quality of life’ is weaponized against debility and chronic illness. Doctors, politicians, pundits decide what lives are worth living and therefore sustaining—and disabled lives rarely make the cut.

13. Every pandemic policy rollback, every Medicaid cut, every attack on the social safety net is a transfer of risk from the state to the individual. Survival becomes a private burden (until you can’t bear it anymore and are funneled into the PIC).

12. Capitalism tells us that health is an individual project. Eat right, work hard, stay positive. When bodies fail, the blame is personal. This erases the political and environmental conditions that make us sick. The MAHA agenda is individuated health meets accelerationism.